Safeguarding DeFi Infrastructure Builders

Welcome to Crypto Long & Short, our institutional newsletter. This week, we delve into the world of DeFi infrastructure and the importance of protecting its builders. Jennifer Rosenthal, chief communications officer at the DeFi Education Fund, highlights the need to defend the people behind DeFi, while Alexis Sirkia, chairman and co-founder of Yellow Network, discusses the flaws in Ethereum's L2 strategy. The DeFi Education Fund, a nonpartisan nonprofit, invites you to join them in protecting the technology and infrastructure that makes DeFi valuable. Key policy objectives include safeguarding software developer protections, which have been a topic of discussion in recent market structure and crypto policy talks. A bipartisan bill, the Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act of 2026, aims to protect software developers from misclassification under criminal code. In another article, Alexis Sirkia argues that Ethereum's scaling problem was never about throughput, but rather about how value moves between participants. He believes that the rollup model was flawed from the start, as it created isolated liquidity pools that can't interact without routing assets through bridge infrastructure. Sirkia proposes state channels as a solution, allowing participants to transact peer-to-peer off-chain, with the base layer serving as the enforcement mechanism. The newsletter also covers the latest headlines, including the impact of smart contract exploits on the market and the growth of bridges between traditional finance and the crypto sector.